On Her Own Ground Read online

  By Wednesday night, the black teams had filled another set of pledge cards, bringing their aggregate to $8,019.64 and putting them more than halfway toward their $15,000 goal. That evening after Madam Walker paid the first $250 installment on her pledge, General Secretary Godard placed the campaign’s total at more than $64,000. In front of the Indiana Avenue Y, Secretary Taylor jubilantly displayed the day’s total by adjusting the hands of an oversized wooden clock decorated with electric lights. “The men,” an ecstatic Jesse Moorland predicted, “are just getting warmed up.”

  By Friday, in a city infused with the momentum of the contest, several more $1,000 pledges had arrived. Among them were promises from banker John Holliday, founder of the Indianapolis News, and his wife, Evaline Holliday, as well as James A. Allison, Carl Fisher’s Motor Speedway and Prest-O-Lite partner. And there were other, smaller, but no less noteworthy gifts. Poet James Whitcomb Riley, who had known George Knox since his childhood in Greenfield, Indiana, contributed $100. The colored porters of the Eli Lilly Company, the growing pharmaceutical concern, also had taken up a collection to help the cause.

  On Saturday the Indiana Avenue teams collected more than $2,000, pushing their total above $13,000. By the end of the day, with only four days left, the city was less than $19,000 shy of its objective. But Godard had grown anxious that the teams might fail to raise the $75,000 stipulated by Rosenwald’s offer. “Unless there is a more generous response on the part of citizens from whom we have a right to expect support during these next few days, this enterprise will be in a precarious condition,” he warned.

  To motivate the Indiana Avenue canvassers, a large rally featuring a rousing 200-voice male chorus was arranged for Sunday afternoon at the Pythian Temple. “We’re going to build that building,” Godard told the audience of several hundred black men and women, “because we have faith in you . . . But, men!” he exhorted the team captains, “we want you . . . to roll up the biggest list of subscriptions ever made by colored people.” The campaign, asserted one of the visiting white team leaders, was not only the “hardest ever undertaken” in Indianapolis, “it is the greatest thing ever undertaken for the city . . . We’re going to put it through. We have eliminated failure.”

  On Monday, however, the Central Y canvassers hit a snag, bringing in only $2,912.50 on their only day without a single $1,000 subscription. “A chain is no stronger than its weakest link,” said banker John Holliday, challenging his teams to push harder for the sake of civic and personal pride. “If our city is to be built up and grow strong in every way, we must take care of the colored people.” And while his plea dripped with paternalism, it was consistent with the prevailing belief that African Americans would forever occupy a place beneath whites in the social hierarchy of the nation. As if in reply to Holliday, the black team leaders seemed determined to demonstrate their ability to “take care” of themselves. While the white teams had slumped that day, the black canvassers, sparked by their Sunday pep talk, reported a new daily record of $3,138.49. Not only had they inched past the Central Y’s same day total by $225, they had exceeded their $15,000 goal by more than $1,000. “Here’s our opportunity,” Secretary Taylor said proudly. “We raised our $15,000 and more. From now on we will help the Central teams ‘put the thing over.’”

  On Halloween afternoon at the Central Y’s daily check-in, the overall total topped $93,000, including Rosenwald’s pledge. That evening when the Indiana Avenue Y’s figures went over $17,000, its members discovered that the hour hand on their giant clock was stuck, preventing them from advancing it to the next $1,000 marker on the dial. Undaunted, the volunteers gathered around the timepiece and “gave three cheers for ‘$17,000.’”

  The next morning, the Indianapolis Star headlines blared: “Effort Ends Today; $4,458.66 Is Needed.” At lunch, the Central Y teams received marching orders to mount a “supreme effort.” Electric railway entrepreneur Hugh J. McGowan’s $2,000 pledge and former Vice President Fairbanks’s $1,000 gift pushed them more than halfway toward the day’s target. “This movement for a colored Young Men’s Christian Association has made it possible for the colored and white citizens to join together in fellowship,” said Fairbanks later that evening at a second Central Y gathering. “It will make better and more splendid our common citizenship.”

  At 7:30 P.M. the white team leaders—accompanied by Knox, Taylor, Ward, Moorland and, most likely, Madam Walker and dozens of others—moved en masse from the Central Y to 443 Indiana Avenue for “the biggest and most enthusiastic gathering” of the campaign. With the announcement of nearly $2,000 more in pledges from the black community, the final tally was an unexpected $104,000. In the end, more than 1,500 African American donors—from janitors to doctors—had contributed $20,610.73. The Central YMCA gave its final numbers as $59,126.15, almost triple that collected by the black fund-raisers.

  “The colored people,” wrote Knox’s Freeman, “had their first experience in doing something in a big way—for a common cause. All elements were blended; sectarian and factional lines disappeared in the interest of the much-needed institution.” It was, said Knox, “a sign of the best possible condition between the races.”

  Madam Walker’s contribution, though smaller than that of Arthur Jordan or Carl Fisher, had put her on equal footing with other $1,000 givers in the city. And although the white dailies always relegated her to the last line of the $1,000 donors—despite the fact that she made the first $1,000 pledge—the amount of her donation matched that of former Vice President Fairbanks. It equaled those of industrialist James Allison and banker Stoughton Fletcher. It was, in fact, no different from the pledges of much wealthier white men.

  The contribution also solidified her relationship with campaign chair George Knox, a man who, like Madam Walker, had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. A “skilled debater and perennial master of ceremonies,” he now wielded the kind of influence she hoped to acquire. In stepping forward she had helped her community, while also propelling herself to a higher level of visibility. Headlines in black publications across the country heralded her philanthropic generosity, allowing her to claim the title of “Best Known Hair Culturist in America,” no doubt to the chagrin of her rival, Annie Pope-Turnbo. And no paper did more for her national profile and reputation than Knox’s Freeman. “Hurrah for the $100,000 YMCA building! Hurrah for the white folks! Hurrah for the colored folks! Hurrah for Julius Rosenwald and Carl Fisher, Arthur Jordan, Madams Walker and McNairdee! Hurrah for the widow’s mite also!”

  “Mr. Rosenwald’s gift challenged colored people to self-respect through self-support,” Jesse Moorland observed years later. Madam Walker had been one of the first to grasp the significance of the movement. Certainly the symbolism of her gift challenged all conventional wisdom about black women and wealth in early-twentieth-century America. At a time when it was widely believed that women were neither emotionally nor physically suited to be involved in the world of commerce, she had long ago stepped beyond the circumscribed “natural role” of wife and mother. During an era when African Americans were believed to be incapable of developing their own communities, she had refuted the stereotype that blacks could not be successful in business.

  CHAPTER 11

  “I Promoted Myself . . .”

  As soon as she learned of Booker T. Washington’s forthcoming January 1912 Negro Farmers’ Conference, Madam Walker began planning not just a trip but a pilgrimage to his school in Tuskegee, Alabama. Two years after her first letter to Washington, she was still struggling to convince him of the “merits” of her work. Even at the Knights of Pythias gathering the previous summer, when he learned of her busy factory, he remained reserved. Aware that an endorsement from Washington, the nation’s most well-known advocate for black entrepreneurs, would elevate her business and her personal stature, she resolved to win him over.

  Madam Walker had no doubt that Washington was aware of her YMCA pledge, especially since Knox’s Freeman was a paper he and his secretary, Emme
tt Scott, frequently read. With hopes that he might view her more favorably as a result of her $1,000 donation, Madam Walker wrote to him in early December “to ask if you will allow me to introduce my work and give me the privilege of selling my goods on the grounds.” Enclosing an attractive sixteen-page booklet, “which will give you an idea of the business in which I am engaged,” she felt sure her brief biography and the photographs of her home, salon, factory and employees would remind him that she too had overcome an early life of hardship. Because advance publicity for the assembly promised that participants would be “entertained as the guests of the school” and given “a warm welcome in person” by Washington himself, she anticipated an opportunity to interact with him more closely than she had been able to in the past.

  Basking from another prosperous year, Madam Walker sincerely believed her story could inspire the 2,000 farmers who were expected to gather at Washington’s twentieth annual agricultural conference. Earlier that year, almost as soon as the factory behind her house was completed, she had purchased a second building next door at 644 North West Street. Her annual earnings continued their steady climb, reaching more than $13,000, a tenfold increase after just five years in business. But like the farmers, she had started out on a plantation. Surely Washington would see the value in including her on his program. His reply to her letter was prompt, in keeping with his mandate that all mail to his office be answered on the day it arrived, even “if it is necessary to remain at the office until twelve o’clock at night to do it.” But it was also searingly curt. “My dear Mme. Walker,” he began patronizingly, “I fear you misunderstand the kind of meeting our Tuskegee Negro Conference will be.” And although Washington himself had earlier said that “the Negro farmer often passes from agriculture to business,” he saw no place for her at “a meeting of poor farmers who come here for instruction and guidance, and who have very little or no money.” With no compliments for the impressive prospectus she had mailed, he informed her that he was “well acquainted” with her business, “but somehow I do not feel that a visit to our Conference would offer the opportunity which you seem to desire.”

  The letter was vintage Washington, but it appears that Emmett Scott, and not Washington himself, composed it. After examining the correspondence, Scott’s biographer Maceo C. Dailey, Jr., recognized the handwriting as that of Scott, who often served as Washington’s authorized ghostwriter. But Madam Walker would not have known that at the time, so she would have accepted the sentiment as Washington’s own. Familiar as Scott was with Washington’s discomfort with the hair products advertisements that so often appeared in black newspapers, he may or may not have consulted Washington before dictating his discouraging reply. Once called Washington’s Iago, Scott was so in sync with his superior’s sensibilities and opinions that at times “it was almost impossible to tell which of Washington’s communications was written by him and which by Scott,” according to Washington biographer Louis R. Harlan.

  Washington “first opposed membership in the National Negro Business League for . . . cosmetics manufacturers on the ground that they fostered imitation of white beauty standards, but he later relented,” Harlan also noted. In taking such a stance, perhaps Washington was under the lingering influence of his straitlaced, Victorian-era education at Hampton Institute, where Mary Armstrong, wife of principal Samuel Chapman Armstrong, had reminded the black and Native American female students that “paint and powder” were undesirable artifice, “always unclean, false, unwholesome.” While Washington included barbers in his 1907 book, The Negro in Business, he “deliberately left out” hair care products manufacturers. The two black women hairdressers who were permitted to address the annual National Negro Business League convention in 1901 and 1905 may have been acceptable to Washington because they catered to a white clientele and did not service black women.

  Less than two weeks after the Washington/Scott letter to Madam Walker, Washington wrote New York Age editor Fred Moore that he had come to “view with alarm” the “considerable amount” of “clairvoyant advertising . . . hair straightening advertising, and fake religious advertising” that appeared in his newspaper. Such advertising, he admonished Moore—who had once vowed never to accept such fare—does not “add to the prestige of your newspaper” and “is of that character which subjects us to the ridicule of even our best white friends.” Because Washington had “subsidized The Age for several years” and had “clandestinely advanced money to Moore” to purchase the paper, his words carried inordinate weight. “You ought to very seriously consider this matter and I hope you will,” Washington warned not at all subtly.

  In seeking to banish hair care ads from the newspapers he controlled, Washington had failed to grasp a changing trend affecting American women and their relationship with the nation’s marketplace. Stubbornly old-fashioned on the issue, he seemed not at all attuned to a growing beauty products industry that was responding to increasingly urbanized women eager to move from homemade creams and pharmaceutical compounds to mass-marketed cosmetics and hair care aids. There had been “no identifiable ‘cosmetics industry’ in the nineteenth century, no large and distinct sector of the economy devoted to beauty products,” according to historian Kathy Peiss. But by the early 1900s “an emergent class of managers and professionals were developing new methods that would come to dominate American business.” Madam Walker was among those in the forefront who “devised a national system of mass production, distribution, marketing, and advertising that transformed local patterns of buying and selling” and made “cosmetics affordable and indispensable to all women.”

  The brusque letter from Tuskegee only made Madam Walker more determined to visit the campus in January. But in early December while she waited, she switched her attention to Lelia’s forthcoming Christmas visit to Indianapolis. “It is pleasant to note with what joyous expectations Madam looks forward [to] your coming,” F. B. Ransom, the young attorney and now family friend, wrote to Lelia.

  To clarify her relationship to the Walker Manufacturing Company and its founder, Lelia had begun calling herself “Mrs. Lelia Walker Robinson” in advertisements and announcements. While adding “Walker” to her professional name may have made it clear that she was the daughter of Madam Walker, it was becoming less clear how much longer C.J. would remain her stepfather.

  As the new year approached, the Walker marriage still was problematic. Unresolved, but not yet dissolved, the union slowly continued to unravel. C.J., who had spent little time in Indianapolis since the fall, remained on an extended trip throughout the South and Midwest during January. And he was not spending all of his nights alone. In Kansas City, Missouri, where he had stopped the previous August, he arranged a rendezvous with a woman named Louise during December or early January. In mid-January when Louise answered his recent “sweet and kind letter,” she professed her love and called him a “big, sensible, strong, businessman.” While his wife had probably not flattered him so in a long time, Louise vowed that she was “content to wait for [him],” with hopes that they would be together by April. Less than a week later, Madam Walker, who seems to have known nothing about Louise, was joined by C.J. in Tuskegee for the Farmers’ Conference. Of course, he volunteered no information about his tryst. But soon enough his actions would betray him.

  Uninvited, but undaunted, Madam Walker traveled to Alabama armed with a letter of introduction from Thomas Taylor, the highly respected executive secretary of Indianapolis’s colored YMCA. Shortly after reaching the 2,000-acre Tuskegee campus, she appeared unannounced on Washington’s front porch. “She came knocking on his door at his private home,” Louis Harlan recalled from a conversation with a Washington family member. Whether he saw her or whether an aide greeted her that morning is not known, but Madam Walker had come too far to be turned away. “He tried to discourage her,” said Harlan, “but she insisted.”

  In her own hand-delivered letter, she entreated Washington to “be kind enough to introduce me” to the conference and �
�not deny me this one opportunity.” Now instead of wanting to sell her goods, she wrote, she simply wished to tell the farmers how she had overcome some of the same obstacles they faced. “I want them to know that I am in the business world, not for myself alone, but to do all the good I can for the uplift of my race, which you well know by the great sacrifice I made in the interest of the Y.M.C.A. of Indianapolis,” she reminded Washington. Hoping to lessen whatever irritation her brash behavior may have created, she signed her letter “Obeidently yours,” a well-intentioned though misspelled closing line, exposing the spottiness of her formal education. Declining to address her directly, Washington once again dispatched Scott to respond to her.

  “It is possible Scott may have taken some liberties of his own in saying ‘no’” to Madam Walker’s initial request to visit the campus, speculates Scott’s biographer Dailey. “But when faced with [her] persistence [he] had to bring the matter to Washington for the follow-up decision.” Whether it was Madam Walker’s persistence or the letter from Taylor that ultimately made the difference, Scott’s subsequent answer was the one she had long awaited. “I have talked with Mr. Washington and he agrees to arrange for you to speak for 10 minutes tonight in the Chapel,” Scott wrote. But even in his invitation, he added a not so thinly veiled dig. “We will have a very full audience there at that time and it will be more proper we think to speak tonight instead of in the regular Conference.”

  That evening in chapel Madam Walker told the conferees of her “great struggle from the age of seven years without any parents to assist me” and how she had “succeeded in . . . the business arena . . . to where my income is now more than $1,000 per month.” She urged them to keep at their work so that they could “do likewise.”

  The campus newspaper, which reported extensively on the school’s activities, was surprisingly silent on her presentation, perhaps because Scott was its editor. But Madam Walker made few public appearances where she was not well received. And the reaction was sufficiently positive that she extended her stay and managed to persuade Washington to allow her to market her products.